Overview

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is an independent, nonprofit organization providing adult cancer treatment and groundbreaking research focused on cancer and infectious diseases. Based in Seattle, Fred Hutch is the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Washington.

With a track record of global leadership in bone marrow transplantation, HIV/AIDS prevention, immunotherapy and COVID-19 vaccines, Fred Hutch has earned a reputation as one of the world's leading cancer, infectious disease and biomedical research centers. Fred Hutch operates eight clinical care sites that provide medical oncology, infusion, radiation, proton therapy and related services, and network affiliations with hospitals in five states. Together, our fully integrated research and clinical care teams seek to discover new cures to the world's deadliest diseases and make life beyond cancer a reality.

At Fred Hutch we value collaboration, compassion, determination, excellence, innovation, integrity and respect. These values are grounded in and expressed through the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. Our mission is directly tied to the humanity, dignity and inherent value of each employee, patient, community member and supporter. Our commitment to learning across our differences and similarities make us stronger. We seek employees who bring different and innovative ways of seeing the world and solving problems. Fred Hutch is in pursuit of becoming an anti-racist organization. We are committed to ensuring that all candidates hired share our commitment to diversity, anti-racism and inclusion.

We have an opening for a bioinformatician in the Bedford lab at the Fred Hutch to work on genomic epidemiology and evolutionary analysis of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, seasonal influenza, and other emerging and endemic pathogens. This position will contribute to ongoing work for the Bedford lab and Nextstrain.

Nextstrain is an award-winning project for tracking infectious disease epidemics developed in collaboration with the Neher lab at the University of Basel. Nextstrain won the Open Science Prize in Feb 2017 and has been instrumental in analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Ebola outbreaks, Zika spread in the Americas and is used by the World Health Organization to aid in the process of influenza vaccine strain selection. The software we write to power all parts of Nextstrain--bioinformatics, visualizations, analysis pipelines, data management, and more--is entirely open-source and available to the public. We work with public health entities and scientists across the world, both formally and informally, to expand pathogen surveillance capabilities and to improve the automation and robustness of these analyses. Our goal is to empower the wider genomic epidemiology and public health communities to tweak our analyses, create new ones, and communicate scientific insights using the same tools we do.

An ideal candidate would be local to the Seattle area or willing to relocate, but remote work is also an option.

Responsibilities

This role advances the research aims of the Bedford lab and the Nextstrain team through a combination of independent work, collaboration with scientists and software developers in the group, and interactions with the wider public health and science communities. In this role, the bioinformatician will:

• Develop and maintain analytic pipelines such as those that clean and ingest genome metadata, build phylogenetic trees, and run forecasting models for SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens
• Improve the robustness, automation, and monitoring of our existing pathogen pipelines
• Develop reproducible pipelines to expand surveillance of endemic and emerging human pathogens, in collaboration with both internal and external groups
• Participate in community outreach through office hours, discussion forums, and mailing lists
• Write and maintain thorough documentation on software and pipelines
• Design software with a diverse range of collaborators and users in mind
• Contribute to the Nextstrain team's decision-making and planning processes
• Present at Bedford lab meetings

Qualifications

Minimum qualifications

• Master's degree in bioinformatics, computational biology, biology, or related field with at least three years' direct experience in computational analysis of large sequence-based molecular data sets.
• Fluency in at least one high-level programming language, such as Python, R, Ruby, JavaScript, or Perl
• Familiarity with version control and other software development best practices
• Experience with workflow managers such as Snakemake, Nextflow, or WDL
• Knowledge of molecular biology
• Motivated to learn new skills and technologies and collaborate within an existing team's practices
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Preferred qualifications

• Expertise in genomics
• Knowledge of automated testing and workflows such as GitHub Actions
• Experience configuring and deploying analyses on a cloud infrastructure

To aid in applicant review, a coding sample is requested. We're happy to review whatever you're most proud of (in any programming language). If you don't have code that can be publicly shared, that's okay. Please apply anyway and just let us know that this isn't available.

If you think you might be a great fit for this position but are concerned about meeting all qualifications, we'd like to hear from you. Please email Trevor Bedford at tb@bedford.io or John Huddleston at jhuddles@fredhutch.org.

A statement describing your commitment and contributions toward greater diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism in your career or that will be made through your work at Fred Hutch is requested of all finalists.

The annual base salary range for the level II position is from $74,358 to $111,536 and pay offered will be based on experience and qualifications.

The annual base salary range for the level III position is from $86,078 to $129,118 and pay offered will be based on experience and qualifications.

This position may be eligible for relocation assistance.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center offers employees a comprehensive benefits package designed to enhance health, well-being, and financial security. Benefits include medical/vision, dental, flexible spending accounts, life, disability, retirement, family life support, employee assistance program, onsite health clinic, tuition reimbursement, paid vacation (12-22 days per year), paid sick leave (12-25 days per year), paid holidays (13 days per year), paid parental leave (up to 4 weeks), and partially paid sabbatical leave (up to 6 months).

Our Commitment to Diversity